Creator Connection July Newsletter Article

Creator in the Time of Covid, Loss and a Gritty Hope

Initially, through this pandemic, my recurring question became “When will we return to how everything was before?” And, quickly, my heart gave an answer I did not want to embrace.

I have blogged about Creator worship for over seven years now and our congregation's worship is second nature to me. As we started taking precautions this Spring around the pandemic, Sundays changed. Suddenly many of our usual routines and trappings were gone.  Our pastor was gone.  And even this devastating circumstance, that was particular to Creator, became dwarfed by what the world was learning about the coronavirus, and the increasing number of cases and lives this pandemic was taking daily.

Fearlessly the congregation decided to continue to hold online Creator worship services during Holy Week. Previous planning for Holy Week gatherings had to be scrapped. Aspects of our first zoom services were unfamiliar but, fortunately, the familiar presence of Josh Stromberg-Wojcik in the sanctuary helped us make a needed transition.

Creator’s Maundy Thursday had no communion. This was hardly ideal but there was no time to imagine how to change what we thought was required for communion before that Thursday was upon us. I don't think God minded though, in the midst of 2020’s springtime of suffering that our whole world endured.

This April taught us that Christians are custodians of a tear-soaked faith tradition.  When facing this pandemic, that tradition gives our church different experiences. We are invited to engage in more intimate perspectives and connections. The scripture readings may elicit more nuanced responses than in the past as well.

The death and darkness embodied in our last Good Friday service were far too real for many. The stories told at our Easter Vigil felt more personal and reassuring and, for most, became dearer to us. Finally, Easter’s inevitable triumph did arrive but at an inner cost for some that could not be glossed over or ignored.  

Another passage echoed within me during this year's Holy Week. T. S. Elliot’s opening words of the Wasteland kept whispering their dark. inescapable truth. “April is the cruelest month, breeding. lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. memory and desire, stirring. dull roots with spring rain.”

Until this year there was simply a bleakness in those words.  For me, the Wasteland’s April bred and stirred an unrealized hope of new life. April’s lilacs memorialized death bred out of a dead land. After this Easter at the end of that statement I now sense something different. A hope I had not considered before. A tenacious, gritty hope that, in April, nature constantly keeps stirring those dull roots with spring rain; despite of, and in defiance of, the dead land.  

The death and life that filled this Lent and Easter were astonishing. The grief, joy, isolation and togetherness the Creator community went through convinces me that our congregation, like our country, will not be the same after this pandemic. And this was, in the end, the quick answer to my recurring question. I did not embrace this answer because I deeply lamented feeling that things would not be the same. The thought drained me of hope for months because I longed for those Creator connections that always came when we physically gathered as a community.

Yet that longing ignored a deeper truth. These past few months have shown that our collective, tear-soaked faith in connections and God's promises must parallel nature's constant, gritty hope for life stirring from dull roots. Zoom worship is lacking as a substitute for what we knew before the pandemic. Personally I long for the day where I can participate in, or just listen to, a live performance of united voices raised in song. Right now I don't know when that will happen.

Yes, we may all yearn for something more but we must also remember that we are all living through these uncertain times together. Alone, none of us can consistently carry on with all the responses our world needs. Addressing the country's current health and social inequities while dealing with our pressing national environmental and economic concerns may overwhelm us as individuals. Yet all these struggles must continue and our collective hearts and minds must be engaged.

The Church and our faith can help us from being individually overwhelmed and I trust we will continue to keep in mind the love and respect that each person deserves as we ask God to help us.